


I See Your True Colours

by 221b_hound



Series: Guitar Man [51]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pregnancy, Trust, the ballad of Sally and Mycroft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 12:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sally sits by the fire, contemplating the baby she carries, and how she came to love Mycroft Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I See Your True Colours

**Author's Note:**

> A long time ago, someone prompted me to write about Sally and Mycroft's relationship from Sally's point of view. I hope this is what you wanted.
> 
> The title is of course from Cyndi Lauper's True Colours.

They are a curious couple, Sally Donovan and Mycroft Holmes. Not an obvious match: even less so to the people who actually know them both. Perhaps in the end nobody knew them as well as they discovered they knew each other. _He_ believed that she could be strong and smart and capable; _she_ believed he could be gentle and passionate and kind. Thus, love was born.

It’s a ferocious love, as it turns out.

It’s got nothing to do with the surface, of course. The surface is nothing. It’s what you present to the world. It’s armour, or a cloak. Strengthening and concealing and deflecting.

Here, in this house, in this room, with this person, Mycroft and Sally dispense with the surface. Here, armour and cloak both are discarded. It took a while to get to this place, but now that they have it, neither can imagine dispensing with it. Who knew that joy could be so _domestic_?

Sally Donovan sits on the sofa by the fireplace in their home and holds her hands over the swell of her stomach. She gazes at the curve of it wonderingly. Within her own body grows a child that combines (she hopes) the best of herself and the best of the Holmses. She’s knows, _of course_ , that the biological father is Sherlock, but she always thinks of Mycroft as the father. When she thinks of the baby’s genetic heritage, she thinks _Holmes_ not _Sherlock_.

The baby moves and Sally places her hand against her stretched skin. _Is this his foot?_ she wonders. _His hand?_ She likes feeling him move, even though it’s uncomfortable. She likes it best when Mycroft is near, when the baby moves. She likes the way Mycroft goes still and watches her with his eyes large and soft, his mouth a little open, as though he can breathe in the essence of the moment, the better to savour it later.

It’s a little like the expression he has when he allows himself a whole smile, or the laugh she suspects only she hears. It’s the look that says that he can _want_ , and that he can _have,_ and that he’s not used to _both_. It’s a look that simultaneously breaks her heart and makes it swell and bloom with love for him.

She doesn’t miss her days at the Met, with Greg Lestrade and Tad Anderson. She has affection for them still, but it’s complicated. Everything had soured, long before she accused Sherlock Holmes of being a fraud, before she became an unwitting but not unwilling pawn in Moriarty’s vile game.

Sally Donovan started her career as a sharp, competent, steady police officer, eager to do well. Years followed of subtle struggle, against perceptions of her gender, her colour, her class. It got tiring, and she grew a hard skin learning to ignore it. And then came Sherlock Holmes, who to be fair was even-handed in his disdain of everyone he met, regardless of gender, ethnicity, social position. It pissed her off, though, the effortlessness with which he mastered work and success that she had worked like the devil to achieve. In the end, her team’s association with Sherlock and his impatient intellect and hyperactive energy and thoughtless tongue had made her doubt her abilities; made her frustrated and exhausted and mean.

She’s well aware she played her own part in that vicious feedback loop with Sherlock: the name-calling, like _freak_ , the contempt, the hostility. Between the two of them, a wall went up and it looked like it would never come down.

She knows him better now. Sherlock Holmes has changed, too. Well, haven’t they all? All of them broken in unexpected ways, and then instead of dying, growing stronger.  Growing from the ashes of their former selves.

Sherlock’s return became the opportunity to make up for her mistakes, the opportunity to leave them behind: to show again what she was, what she could be.

Mycroft not only gave her that opportunity – he trusted her. Sally would never have credited how intoxicating it was, to have someone _expect_ you to do well, instead of expecting you to fail. Perhaps that’s not how it began – perhaps Mycroft, to start with, was just assessing her, to see whether she had that capacity. But she had risen to the challenge, and he had given her more responsibility, more complex tasks. He began to expect her to succeed, and to surprise him, and she didn’t want to fail him in that regard.

The baby moves again and, with a small grunt of discomfort, Sally shifts her position on the sofa. The baby seems to be satisfied with the motion and settles again.

A baby. It’s still surreal, even though it’s all been so carefully planned. When she was with Tad Anderson, the idea of a child had never occurred to them. Even if Tad had managed, back then, to wrest free from his controlling wife, she didn’t think it was where they’d have ended up. They were fond of each other, but it wasn’t love. Not like this.

Tad is gentle, but he has this stubborn, tough core to him. Nobody else used to see it, not even the DI, but with that band, the joy Tad finds in drumming, she thinks maybe they see it now. She hopes so.

Mycroft, Sally thinks, is the inverse of Tad. The toughness is all on the outside, layers of Teflon and steel, but in the core of him is a soft heart. Most people have layers, but the Holmes men? Their layers are labyrinths, thick and heavy, full of contradictions.  But at the core of them – Sherlock, she realises, as well as Mycroft – there is something terribly vulnerable.

Sally realises suddenly that John knows that core of Sherlock Holmes, and that in turn, Sherlock waits for John to rise to his expectations, rather than waiting to be disappointed. How long did it take them to reach that place?

She understands John Watson more in that moment of realisation, too.

She understands that it gives you strength to be trusted, and being trusted gives you the desire to never let that trust down. It gives you strength to meet someone’s expectations, and then exceed them, and then to _confound_ their expectations because they never knew the ways in which they needed you. Or you, them.

Mycroft trusted her to do her job. And then he trusted her to surprise him. And then he trusted her to see him with his guard down. Then he trusted her to not use his vulnerability against him.

Sally’s road has been rocky and painful. She has gone from confident and capable, to frustrated and angry, to being completely wrong about everything and losing faith in herself.

Then she found this one strange, difficult man who believed she had the ability to do what was needed, and gave her a chance to win back her self respect. She took it, ran with it, built herself anew, and then showed him that she had something to give him too.

With Mycroft, she is competent, strong, capable, powerful.

With Mycroft, she is loved for every part of herself, every strength and every flaw.

Including the flaw that she is tone deaf. Still, she can dance, and he has loved teaching her the ballroom standards.

Sally rubs her hands over and over her belly in sweeping circles. She leans down, and despite her lack of singing ability, she croons at the life inside. The words don’t rhyme and they barely scan and that doesn’t matter one little bit.

_Mycroft is your daddy and Sally is your mummy  
and you are loved you are wanted you are loved_

She sings prose, a story of how they met, and how Mycroft likes classical music and Sally watches Australian soap operas for the endless sunshiney days in them. She sings about how she likes Thai food and Mycroft prefers French and that they both like sacher torte and dancing and doing good work and making a difference and how they once saved each other’s lives.

She sings their unborn son the ballad of Sally and Mycroft: the unlikely couple who discovered the power to heal each other.

 


End file.
